Vietnam to move all public administrations to open source

The Ministry of Information and Communications on 30 December issued an instruction telling all state agencies to start using open source, reports the government-owned Vietnamnet news agency.

The open source office suite OpenOffice, web browser Firefox and email client application Thunderbird should be installed at all government agencies by the end of June this year. At least half of all the staff should at that point have been trained on how to use these three applications.

At the end of the year, the software should be installed on 70 percent of all PCs and at least 40 percent of the users should be using the applications. At the end of 2010, all staff in all agencies must be able to use the selected open source applications, the ministry expects.

According to a report by the IDG news service, the Southeast Asian country hopes that using open source will boost the local software sector. In 2004 it began promoting this type of software in universities and in public administrations.

Vietnam is the third country that is massively migrating to open source software. Venezuela announced such plans for all of its 27 ministries and more than 520 other public organisations in 2005. The organisations where originally expected to migrate before December 2007. The deadline was later extended to the end of last year.
The open source centre of the Malaysian government last week reported  that moving the Malaysian public sector to open source has resulted in savings on licence costs of 40 million MYR (about 8.5 million euro). In its quarterly newsletter, the open source resource centre, writes for example that OpenOffice is being used by 12,760 civil servants. Using the open source alternative is saving the government 12 million MYR (about 2.5 million euro) in licence fees.



More information:

Vietnam Net news item

Instruction by the Ministry of Information and Communication (in Vietnamese, doc)

News item (in English)

News item (in French)

News item (in German)

News item (in Italian)

News item (in Spanish)

Earlier Osor.eu news item on Venezuela

News item on Malaysia

Malaysian open source competence centre

Malaysian open source competence centre newsletter (PDF)